]]>We recently learned that academic institutions in the UK are no longer providing third-level qualifications in technical communication. Several techcomm courses that had existed at various universities have been shut down. The topic of techcomm education was already one in which we were keenly interested and actively involved. This information seemed to contradict our perception that there is a healthy demand for qualified technical communicators, across various sectors, by employers and client companies. We decided to dig deeper to find out more.

David outlined the other techcomm courses across the UK that have met a similar fate:

‘A BA in Communication Design at Coventry University closed in 2008. Before that, an MSc in Scientific and Technical Communication at London South Bank University closed. There also used to be an MA in Professional Communication at London Metropolitan University, and Portsmouth University offered an MA course, both of which have been withdrawn.’

This litany of closures illustrates the decline of techcomm education in the UK.

To put this in context, our recent survey on techcomm education found that a high proportion of technical communicators do not hold academic qualifications relating to their profession. In fact, more than two thirds of respondents had no formal techcomm qualification. It is worth noting, however, that most were highly experienced. This reflects the trend observed elsewhere that the more years’ of professional experience technical communicators have, the less likely they are to hold qualifications.

In the absence of dedicated academic courses in the UK, techcomm is only taught through modules (or units) offered as part of certain undergraduate or postgraduate programmes in related fields. Institutions that offer such modules include Imperial College London, Norwich University of the Arts, Middlesex University London, The Open University, and University of Portsmouth. There are also a variety of commercial training programmes available, a handful of which are accredited by the ISTC. In an effort to revive techcomm education in the UK, the ISTC is in the process of identifying institutions with courses in related topics, to explore whether techcomm can be built into existing programmes.

Image: The Graduates by Sakeeb Sabakka (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sakeeb/4647211575/) CC BY 2.0

The demand for these courses appears healthy and it seems that graduates are sought after by employers. UL has compiled data on graduate employment that suggests the outcomes for graduates of the MA in Technical Communication and E-Learning are very positive. In 2013, 100% of graduates were engaged in employment or further studies, with 64% employed in Ireland. (Note that these figures are based on a small sample of graduates.) This lends support to our anecdotal impressions regarding the market demand for qualified technical communicators.

Unfortunately, very little empirical evidence is available on the techcomm employment market. However, an EU-funded educational initiative called TecCOMFrame is being developed by the German-based professional association, tekom, based on the premise that the current provision of techcomm education is insufficient. The website of the TecCOMFrame project states:

‘Throughout Europe, we have identified a gap between the number of students graduating in technical communication and the number of open jobs in this field … the demand for formally trained technical writers is high.’

Professional Development and the Development of the Profession

So does the UK techcomm employment market differ from the European norm? This seems unlikely. There are multiple factors at play but it is difficult to get a holistic understanding due to the lack of research on the profession. Ironically, a stronger techcomm academic sector is needed to remedy this knowledge deficit.

Alison Peck, President of the ISTC, pointed out that the unavailability of qualifications can have the effect of dampening demand, leading to a downward spiral. She highlighted some key reasons why academic education is important to the profession as a whole:

‘If we want to be taken seriously as a profession in our own right, we need some way of becoming qualified in our field, of passing on both the theoretical and practical knowledge we already have and of undertaking formal research to move forward.’

People enter techcomm from a wide array of backgrounds and this diversity can be seen as a very valuable asset – as highlighted by several speakers at this year’s TCUK conference. However, insufficient educational provision can make it difficult to enter the profession. Furthermore, it may negatively affect those working in techcomm seeking to improve the visibility of their work or avoid career stagnation.

Image: Career Mind-Map on Chalk Board by Flazingo (https://www.flazingo.com/creativecommons) CC BY 2.0

Patrice Fanning, CEO of TWi, agrees that there are compelling reasons to promote and develop techcomm education, from both industry and practitioner perspectives:

‘Our company employs several graduates of the UL techcomm courses and is currently sponsoring three employees in undertaking qualifications. We believe that the availability of quality techcomm programmes is an important element in facilitating the professional development of technical communicators. We invest time and energy in techcomm education because it is so relevant and beneficial to us and to our wider professional community.’

What we have learned about the current situation of techcomm education has reinforced our enthusiasm for contributing to the development of a new programme in a local academic institution. We will continue to draw attention to and explore the related issues with our colleagues in the techcomm community.

We would like to hear from all of you – techcomm practitioners, students, graduates, and academics, as well as employers and clients who purchase technical communications services. Do you think the provision of academic techcomm education through modules rather than stand-alone courses is sufficient? Are academic qualifications desirable or are technical training courses preferable? Do you think the limited availability of academic education and qualifications affects the status of techcomm as a profession? Your insights on these issues are most welcome!

]]>https://www.technicallywriteit.com/techcomm-education-whats-going-on/feed/1Techcomm Today: Survey Findingshttps://www.technicallywriteit.com/techcomm-today-survey-findings/ https://www.technicallywriteit.com/techcomm-today-survey-findings/#commentsThu, 15 Oct 2015 06:24:50 +0000http://www.technicallywriteit.com/?p=1367Techcomm education was a hot topic at the recent Technical Communications UK conference (TCUK), fuelling two panel sessions and many conversations outside of the formal programme. At the event, we conducted a survey exploring the qualifications, skills, knowledge, and experience techcomm practitioners bring to and use in their roles. About Our Findings We encountered great […]

]]>Techcomm education was a hot topic at the recent Technical Communications UK conference (TCUK), fuelling two panel sessions and many conversations outside of the formal programme. At the event, we conducted a survey exploring the qualifications, skills, knowledge, and experience techcomm practitioners bring to and use in their roles.

About Our Findings

We encountered great interest and enthusiasm for the subject of techcomm education and were delighted with the response rate. Over a third of the 170 technical communicators who attended TCUK took part in our survey. We present the key findings below, based on these 62 responses. Note that the results we present here are valid for this sample group only; where this is not explicitly stated, it can be assumed throughout. While we don’t claim that our findings can be extrapolated to the whole techcomm community, comparing them with similar surveys we think they provide a useful indicator of patterns and trends.

Employment Circumstances

According to our survey, the typical technical communicator:

Works for a company where techcomm supports the main activities of the company

Operates within a team of technical communicators

Works full-time, in the office (or partly from home)

A smaller proportion of respondents are freelancers, who work independently or support the work of techcomm teams on a contract basis.

Qualifications and Experience

The technical communicators attending TCUK are highly experienced; the vast majority (70%) have over 10 years’ experience in their industry areas. Interestingly, most respondents do not hold a techcomm educational qualification.

Techcomm Qualifications

We found that respondents are more likely to have a qualification relating to the industry in which they work, than a qualification in techcomm. In cases where respondents hold industry-related qualifications, these tend to be at a higher level than their techcomm qualifications. The predominant industry qualifications held by respondents are undergraduate or postgraduate degrees, whereas the most common techcomm qualifications are graduate certificates or unaccredited courses.

Typically, rather than holding formal qualifications, respondents bring transferable skills and knowledge to their roles, engage in on-the-job and self-led learning, and undertake training in specific tools or skills as required.

Industries Served by Techcomm

The top three industries for which our respondents provide techcomm services are:

1. Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

2. Engineering

3. Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI)

The high proportion working in or providing services for the ICT sector is consistent with the findings of a recent Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) survey. The status of engineering as the second most significant industry employing technical communicators also reflects the findings of that US-based study. However, there is a difference in the third place ranking: more of our respondents serve the BFSI sector than the DCL research found to be the case amongst its sample.

Tasks, Outputs, and Audiences

Our survey confirms that technical communicators carry out a wide range of tasks in their day-to-day work and produce a variety of documentation outputs for diverse audiences.

The top three tasks our respondents carry out, outputs they produce, and audiences for their outputs are presented in the following table.

Top Tasks, Outputs, and Audiences

Despite the multiplicity of activities carried out by technical communicators and the fast pace of change in the techcomm workplace, we found that we can identify a core set of duties and work products that are relevant to the majority of respondents.

The key target audiences indicated by our respondents are reflective of the primary industries in which they operate. The prominence of manuals and help systems in our survey is similar to the DCL study. A point of contrast, however, is that the production of installation guides is an important component of our respondents’ roles, but did not appear as a content type in the DCL findings.

Knowledge, Skills, and Tools

This was a particularly interesting area for us, especially when compared with findings in other surveys.

ICT Knowledge

Key areas of technology-related knowledge that our respondents require or find beneficial in their work include:

1. Agile development processes

2. Cloud computing

3. API documentation

This finding reinforces the significance of ICT as an industry requiring techcomm services. Moreover, it indicates the extent to which ICT overlaps with other industry areas, given that several of those who provide techcomm services for industries other than ICT also highlight the relevance of these areas of knowledge.

The prominence of agile as an area of knowledge relevant to our respondents is interesting in light of a 2013 survey by The Content Wrangler. That study found that the majority of technical documentation teams had not adopted an agile approach to creating and publishing content, while successful agile implementation was even more elusive.

Languages

Our results highlight the continued and growing importance of the HTML and XML mark-up languages, which the majority of our respondents use in their work. CSS stylesheet language is also widely used by respondents.

Mark-up and Stylesheet Languages

Fewer than a third of our respondents use programming languages to some extent in their work. The most popular programming languages amongst the respondents who use them are:

1. Java

2. C++

3. C

While the relative positioning of C++ and C differs, the top three programming languages used by our respondents are consistent with the IEEE Spectrum ranking.

Tools

We found significant diversity in the tools used by technical communicators. This was particularly notable in relation to content management system (CMS) usage. Two thirds of our respondents stated that they use at least one CMS in their work, and they identified a further 20 types of CMS in addition to the options we provided in the survey. Thus, while Alfresco and Apache Subversion jointly hold the third place ranking in this category, they do not enjoy widespread usage amongst our respondents.

Likewise, although PTC Arbortext and XMetal Author are tied in third place in the XML category, this result is not indicative of extensive usage amongst respondents. MadCap Flare is far more popular amongst respondents who use XML authoring tools.

Overall, we found that Adobe Acrobat maintains a strong position at the top of the pile of authoring tools, and is more widely used than any other tool across all categories. Bear in mind, however, that we took a similar approach to that of the Writers User Assistance (UA) tools survey in excluding Microsoft Word and other Office suite products from our list, due to their ubiquity. Our perception that almost all technical communicators use these tools (or open source equivalents) to varying degrees alongside other tools, was endorsed by the many respondents who referred to Word.

The following table presents the top three in five categories of tools our respondents use in their work.

Top Tools

Our results endorse recent US research on tools usage, notably DITAwriter’s analysis of the Writers UA survey. All but two of the top tools identified by our respondents are amongst DITAwriter’s top ten ranked tools. The main differences are that Notepad++ did not appear to be relevant to our respondents, in contrast to the DITAwriter ranking of Notepad++ at number eight.

Another outlier is Adobe Flash, which came in at a number 49 ranking in DITAwriter’s breakdown. Flash continues to be used by a proportion of our respondents who employ multimedia tools in their work, but it is significantly less popular than TechSmith Camtasia and Adobe Captivate, and its usage is quite low overall.

Further Analysis

These findings provide an evidence basis for understanding current industry conditions and educational requirements, obtained from a sample of those working as technical communicators today. We are feeding this information back to the stakeholders involved in designing academic techcomm courses, and through this blog series we are sharing the key results with the wider techcomm community.

We think that many practitioners will find these survey results a useful measure against which to benchmark their own qualifications, knowledge, skills, and experience. We also believe that educators will find it helpful to have up-to-date information about requirements for the techcomm graduates of tomorrow.

We would love to hear your reaction to our survey findings. How do they relate to your experience? Which results did you find the most interesting? Did any of our findings surprise you?

The next post in this series will explore responses to our survey findings and continue our investigation of techcomm education in more detail. In the meantime, we look forward to hearing from you!